


And a time to die

by slightly_ajar



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Discussions of death, Found Family, Magical Realism, Not a Death FIc!, POV Outsider, Really no one dies in this story, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-19 00:22:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20648135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slightly_ajar/pseuds/slightly_ajar
Summary: A bomb has been set.  Time is running out.  The team are being watched





	And a time to die

**Author's Note:**

> The idea behind this story is totally and utterly based on the story The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
> 
> I was on the way to work and I was thinking about stories and writing, about The Book Thief and how I’ve found that people either really liked it or it really didn’t work for them (I really liked it) and how it was narrated by Death, and I found myself thinking, “hmmm, narrated by Death…”
> 
> And here we are.
> 
> The story title comes from Ecclesiastes 3 'A Time For Everything'.

Death waited. 

It drifted through the crowd, it’s robes flowing, passing people living out their lives in blissful ignorance of what was about to unfold. 

Waiting was what Death had done throughout the ages. It had waited for the snap of a predator’s jaws, for the shivers caused by a bitter winter to stop and beside the clash of swords and shields on a battlefield. The years passed and it waited still, in the depths of candle lit mines, surrounded by the billowing smoke of steam engines and next to the person climbing into their car confident they would be fine to drive after all the drinks they’d just had. 

The ways in which souls passed from one realm to the next had been transformed during Death’s time on the Earth but it’s job had not. As the light dimmed from a person’s eyes and their soul was released Death gathered them up and led them on. For some death was a release, for some a terrible blow. Some raged or tried to bargain while other’s accepted their fate with calm consent. Death had been called cruel and merciful; benevolent, malicious and unfair. None of those accusation were true. 

Death just _was_

It watched and waited. 

It didn’t control how or when the people it carried met their end, it just arrived when a person’s time came. 

Death often considered the changes it had witness to how people met their demise. Hunger and disease had always been but they’d been joined by more complex ways of a human life ending. Death had watched humans since before they’d learned how to shape the elements around them and it still didn’t know if it could answer a questions about if and how their bigger and faster modern lives were better that the slower, less sophisticated ways of the past. Both had merits and disadvantages, Death reasoned. Poverty and plagues were brutal but horses and carts killed far fewer people than vehicles with combustion engines. Bullets could be quick and clean but indiscriminate, and Death wondered at what point the person in a hospital bed actually stop living even though medical intervention kept their heart beating. It had learned from eternities of watching that very little was simply black or white. Good or evil. Right or wrong. 

The device with the diminishing red numbers that had brought Death to park it wandered through was set to cause mass fatalities. For many it would be quick, a flash of light, a burst of heat and they would be gone. Others would have to wait longer to meet the cloak swathed figure drifting among them. Their end would be drawn out, painful, frightening. 

Death had no opinion on how the people it came for died, that wasn’t of it’s concern, but it seemed incongruous to it that humans who were capable of great kindness and beauty were also able to carry out such a massacre. 

Death listening to birds call and the rumble of traffic, watching a woman sing a nursery rhyme to her baby and a man frown at the puzzle in his newspaper. 

And, ah, there they were. The ones it had been looking out for. 

  


Mac and Desi sprinted to a manhole cover and dropped to their knees to pry it open. The splashes of a fast flowing steam rushed up the shaft as it’s cover was lifted away. 

“Great, the channel is full of water.” Desi said wryly as she peered into the hole. ““Riles,” she called into her comms, “we’re at the entrance to the tunnels and we’re heading in now.” She dangled her legs into the hole and raised an eyebrow at Mac. “Ladies first!” 

“Hold on, it might -” Desi pushed forward and vanished into the blackness before Mac could finish his sentence. “Never mind,” he said to himself. He lowered his own legs into the shaft until his feet touched the rusty metal ladder set into the stone walls. “Desi?” he shouted into the blackness beneath him. 

“I’m good.” Desi’s voice echoed upwards. “Are you coming or am I going to have to defuse this sucker myself?” 

“I’m coming.” Mac yelled back and stepped down. 

  


There was no such thing as fate. The names of the people Death came to collect weren’t carved in stone with a date and time etched beside them. Some events were meant to be and couldn’t be altered but human lives were so complicated that the events of many endings could twist and shift depending on choices and circumstance. 

A butterfly flaps it’s wings in Tokyo and a man doesn’t get hit by a cab in New York City. 

Death knew when the timing of a last breath was definite and when the end of a life was a possibility only and it dutifully attended to carry out it’s task in both cases, pragmatically expectant when it knew it would be needed and with detached curiosity when a passing was uncertain. 

It had met incalculable numbers of souls and remembering them all was impossible but there were some that Death recalled. The people that worked against it were the ones it knew. Not all of them, but some. Some of the humans who fought it in hospitals, inside ambulances and beside fire and fear were known to it by sight and name. 

And Death knew the people who had just vanished into the earth. The team of clever, caring, stubborn friends who battled for life in dark and terrible situations. The one with the light hair, Mac, often used his skills to turn Death away. He and his friends had changed the course of events on many occasions, so that while Death had arrived ready to guide souls to their rest it had left empty-handed after danger and tragedy had been diverted. 

Death didn’t have favourites, it didn’t grow fond, but it always watched the team work with interest that verged on enjoyment. 

  


Waist deep water was never fun to run through. It fought your progress, drained your strength and, if it was like the cold, rushing flow Mac and Desi were driving against, it chilled you to the bone while making reaching a ticking bomb difficult. 

“And you said this park was pretty!” Desi said as she and Mac rounded another corner of the shadowy concrete tunnel they were trying to race through. 

“It is!” Mac insisted. “It’s beautiful at street level.” 

“So I’m not seeing at its best right now?” Desi gestured to their tunnel with a dripping hand. “This isn’t the part of it you’d recommend for a picnic?” 

“Not unless you want wet sandwiches.” Mac raised an eyebrow and Desi rolled her eyes with a laugh. 

“Thanks for the tip.” 

“Guys!” Riley’s voice came through the comms, “I’ve found the map of the sewers, you need to take the next turn on your left then go straight ahead, the maintenance duct will be one hundred and fifty feet away.” 

“Thank, Riles.” 

They pushed harder, aware of the countdown they needed to beat, and reached the stairs they were looking for within minutes. Algae covered grey steps climbed up and out of the water with a locked door sitting on the platform above. Desi pulled out her gun and shot off the padlock baring their way, the boom of the shot and clang of the metal lock shattering echoed around the curved walls surrounding them. 

“There’s a bomb in there.” Mac pointed to the door with sarcastically exaggerated patience. 

“I am aware of that, Angus, that’s why I thought it would be a good idea to open the door quickly so we can get in there and do something about it.” 

“And you didn’t worry that a bullet being fired nearby might accidently set the bomb off, Desiree?” 

“Nah, I figured you would have warned me about that if it was possible.” 

“That’s not the point.” 

“Mmmm,” Desi wrinkled up her nose as she hummed, “it kind of is.” 

Mac splashed up the steps. “Why don’t we argue about this later if we don’t die?” 

“That sounds like my kind of plan.” Desi said following him, water pouring from her clothes and she stamped in his wake. 

  


Gallows humour. Death knew of it. Had witnessed it. Understood it. Admired it even, as much as a dispassionate creature could. It had seen bad jokes and shared amusement comfort people in their final moments as, instead of feeling fear or despair, their last act was to find laughter with a friend. Death had also seen it save lives, sometimes sharing dark camaraderie in a dire situation was enough to restore hope and spur a final effort. There was merit in whistling past a graveyard - real strength could be found in the act of pretending to feel it. 

  


Mac opened the briefcase very carefully. A muscle in his jaw flickered. 

It was a small device. Seemingly innocent in size and construction. The bombs in movies that Mac had watched when he was growing up always had alarm clocks attached to them with curling red and blue wires and the word BOMB printed in bold capitals on the side. The one in front of him was chrome and had tidy digital numbers counting down towards zero. It was deadly despite looking like an executive toy, capable of far more destruction than anything that had ever been strapped to the side of a volcano in an old action movie

“Mac?” Desi asked after a pause where Mac had stood motionless. “No pressure, but are you going to start defusing the bomb soon? Because I have a thing I need to do later so I can’t stand here forever.” 

“I think,” Mac said, walking in a circle around the device. “yes, but…what thing are you doing later?” 

“Laundry.” 

“Laundry is a thing? You don’t like doing laundry.” 

“I don’t, but I like being blown up even less, so -” Desi waved a hand in a circle at him. “You said ‘but’, but what?” 

“There’s not enough light in here. And I’ll need some parts. We need to take the suitcase out of here.” 

“Will it be okay if the bomb gets wet?” 

Mac snapped the briefcase shut and held it up above his head. “Let’s not find out.” 

They ran. 

“I’ve found you an exit point.” Riley said in their ears. “Go right, then right again and you’ll get to a gate over an access tunnel, Bozer and I will wait there for you.” 

“Right then right again, copy.” Desi confirmed through gritted teeth, her focus ahead for the light she was straining to see. 

She and Mac turned a corner side by side and were forced to blink at the blinding contrast of sunlight against the gloom. Riley was knelt picking the lock of the gate just beyond the entrance to their tunnel, and jumped back, hauling the metal frame open as they reached it. 

“Ladies first.” Mac panted and Desi ran into the light a few strides ahead of him. 

“Well at least I didn’t have to shoot that padlock off.” Desi said as she skidded to a halt on the grassy verge at the end of the spillway. The park was sunlit and alive with people, a brisk breeze rattled the leaves in the trees around them and carried the smells of donuts and blossoming flowers. 

Bozer was stood next to Riley, a full garbage bag in each hand. “I thought there might be something in one of these that you could you,” he told Mac as he emptied them at his feet, “like a popsicle stick or an empty packet of chips.” 

“Actually, that’s perfect, Boze,” Mac dropped to his knees and picked up a soda can. “That’s just what I need.” he pulled his Swiss Army Knife out of his pocket and bent over the bomb. 

  


Death didn’t understand technology but it recognised skill and it watched as confident hands built and adjusted. While Mac knelt next to the bomb totally focused on his task the others positioned themselves around him, watching, guarding, ready to offer assistant and silently giving support. 

A current in the air shifted. Death felt circumstances eddy and alter. The wind that flowed over Death’s fingers and pulled at it’s robes carried potential and the promise of change. 

The red numbers continued to count down as Mac worked: 

00:08

00:07

00:06

Bozer screwed his eyes shut. 

00:05

Mac pulled out a wire. 

The screen went blank. 

Bozer opened one eye to a cautious slit and looked around him. “Did it go off? Did we die? Is this heaven?” 

“If this was heaven I wouldn’t be wearing wet underwear.” Desi looked down at drenched bottom half of her body. “We made it, Boze.” 

  


Events had been changed. Lives had been saved. Death was no longer needed. It could have left but it lingered, watching the friends as they sat together on a wooden bench, exhausted, wet, filthy, but smiling

  


“Matty,” Mac called, “the bomb has been neutralised, please can you send exfil in to collect and dispose of it.” 

“I hear you, Mac.” Matty replied from the Phoenix’s War Room, “well done, everyone.” 

Desi sat back, getting more comfortable on the hard seat. “This is a nice park,” she said, “I should come here when I’m not trying to stop a bomb detonating underneath an afternoon crowd of innocent people.” 

“And when you’re wearing dry socks?” Mac asked. 

“Dry socks are a definite yes.” 

“And maybe when your clothes don’t smell off…” Bozer leaned over and sniffed delicately in Desi’s direction, “…what is that?” 

“I’m trying not to think about it.” Desi grimaced. 

Mac rang out the bottom of his shirt and brown water dripped on the ground. “Me too.” 

  


Death looked out over the park. The lady with the baby was sat with her eyes closed and her head tipped up to the warmth of the sun while her child slept in the pushchair beside her. The man with the puzzle folded up his newspaper and waved to another man walking over to meet him. 

Death moved on to where it was needed. It knew it would see the team again, it saw everyone eventually, but it felt with a certainty that came from eons of watching that it would probably leave whatever situation it found them in alone. 


End file.
